Implementation issues of diffusion-based molecular communications receivers based on transcriptional elements

The recent research activities on molecular communications systems highlighted impressive potentials for realizing new services in many fields. They include biomedical systems, nanotechnologies, food production and many others. Since the nature of such areas may be extremely different, in terms of geometrical scale, information delivery media, and related technologies, the proposed molecular communication systems include different reception techniques, adapted to the operating environment. In this survey, we focus on systems based on diffusion of signaling molecules, and analyze the main components running in a receiver, namely the reception process and the information decoding mechanism. For each of them, we review the most popular techniques proposed in literature, and discuss the feasibility of using these models to realize receivers based on living cells. In more detail, for the reception process, we discuss the matching between literature models and real reception mechanism. As for the information decoding mechanism, we review and critically discuss its possible implementation through transcriptional elements, which is the main way of implementing processing elements in living cells, highlighting feasibility in term of complexity and decoding time.